Tea With Dr Larkin
by Bouglaf
Summary: Odd people considered


**Tea with Dr Larkin**

Parbury arrived in Hull in the autumn of 1978 to begin postgraduate work in the University's Department of English, as did I. He had straggly and rather thin blond hair down to his shoulders and a beard and whiskers to match. We met at a modest departmental function to welcome us as the only new postgraduates that session and had our urgent interests in poetry in common. He was obsessed with the work of Ezra Pound and his talk seemed limited to asking me what I thought of that writer. Pound was one of the numerous largely unexplored regions on my personal map of literature. Our conversation was not productive.

Parbury's whole manner was, however, unusual and slightly disturbing. He spoke distractedly in a rather high-pitched, upper-class voice that tended towards the softly androgynous and twisted his long blond whiskers or beard in his nervous fingers as he did so. His fingers would move jerkily up the strand of hair they were working on and habitually ended up twitching at his lower lip. His general manner was altogether unsettled and uncomfortable, suggesting an engagement with social reality that was tangential and strained. I later developed a casual theory that he was a stranded Victorian time-traveller in a state of anxiety that approached breakdown about accomplishing his return. He looked rather like Swinburne, though lacking in any dimension of sensuality that would complete the resemblance.

It was at this time the privilege of all those beginning postgraduate studies in the Department of English to be given a tour of the library's reference resources by Philip Larkin. Dr Larkin had been the University librarian at Hull for years by then. He was already an institution on the strength of _The Less Deceived_ and _The Whitsun Weddings_ when I began my undergraduate career there twelve years before in 1966. The man who was arguably the greatest living poet in the English language could still be spotted lurking around the issue desks on dull afternoons trying to spot students slipping short-loan items under their coats and eyeing with the most discreet intensity the unattainable embodiments of female student pulchritude who passed through his domain.

Parbury and I turned up at the library, as invited, at two-thirty on a mid-October afternoon. We reported to the reception desk and were directed towards a table at the near end of the reference stacks that filled the ground floor. A minute or so later, Larkin appeared, bespectacled and tall in his customarily anonymous dark suit. He sat down with us for a couple of minutes and explained that he was going to conduct us around a range of reference resources considered essential to literary scholarship. He informed us matter-of-factly that he was becoming hard of hearing, to which devices in both ears attested, and asked that we might speak clearly to him had we anything to ask. There would, he continued, be a quiz at the end of our tour of the reference stacks to test what we had learned. Afterwards, we would meet for tea in his office. He had, he explained, a tradition of giving "a small prize" to anyone who got all ten questions right.

We proceeded on a 45-minute tour with Larkin's informative commentary on the uses of the various resources. We took in the _British Humanities Index_, the _National Bibliography_, the _British Library Catalogue_, the _OED_, the _Encyclopaedia of Pseudonymous Literature _and many another rank of tomes. All went smoothly, with the exception of one or two occasions when Dr Larkin had been unable to hear Parbury's enquiries properly. Parbury, asked to repeat what he had said, would do so, though barely more loudly or clearly than he had just done. Larkin invariably endured the two or three attempts necessary to effect communication with good grace.

The tour concluded and he thanked us for our attention, producing as he did so two photocopied quiz sheets from an inside pocket. These contained the 10 questions Parbury and I had to answer. They were tricky, requiring oblique approaches through one source of reference to establish details found in another. I set about the work of answering them. I'd done about two when Parbury emerged from behind the stack I was facing and asked in a state of agitation for what amounted to help. I aimed him in the right direction and continued. He returned several times during the total of half an hour allowed to us for supplying the answers, bothersomely urgent with his fingers fluttering where his beard met his lower lip as he made his requests for assistance.

Our allotted half an hour was up. The quiz sheets, with our responses written in the spaces provided, were handed to Dr Larkin when he met us behind the issue desk shortly before four o'clock. We went up two flights in the lift and he opened the door to his office and directed us in. Once Parbury and I were seated at an impressively thick and well-grained conference table, Larkin left the room for a couple of minutes and returned with the news that tea was coming. As he sat down, he produced our quiz papers and regretted that neither us had earned the prize. Parbury had seven out of ten and I had eight. I continue to assure myself I'd have done better if he had not been breathing down my neck so frequently with his near-distraught enquiries. I have often wondered what the "small prize" might have been. I usually decide it would have taken the form of a signed edition of one of Larkin's few but infallibly excellent books. He was not above a dash of vanity in a good cause.

The cups set out and the biscuits ready, Dr Larkin poured the tea from the library's silver-looking teapot. As he did so, he suggested that we might like to discuss anything bearing on our areas of study. It was a decent attempt to relax Parbury and myself into something like conversation with him. He followed through by remarking that I was proposing a thesis on regional elements in twentieth-century British poetry. Reasonably enough, he asked me for examples of the regions and poets in question. I replied by indicating Seamus Heaney's work in Northern Ireland, Tony Harrison's and Ted Hughes's in Yorkshire, and sundry other instances of the tendency to metropolitan recognition of the provinces that prompted my study. In the end, I wrote mostly about Auden and his intense affinity with disused lead mines in the Pennines, an accident of the imagination rather than any culturally meaningful poetic coincidence of place and sensibility.

It was Parbury's turn. With his fingers twitching round a strand of beard, he voiced the question "What do you think of Ezra Pound?" It was about the fifth occasion that afternoon on which Parbury had addressed himself to Larkin insufficiently loudly or clearly to be understood. The further fact that Larkin's low opinion of Pound was a matter of literary record is not, perhaps, wholly irrelevant. I felt an embarrassment that was becoming routine as Larkin turned towards him to say he hadn't heard the question properly. Parbury asked once more what Larkin made of Ezra Pound. Again, the mumbled enquiry fell on partially deaf ears and again Larkin politely asked Parbury to repeat it. At this juncture, Parbury's reaction was to bellow out his question with all the volume his chronically enervated voice could muster. He screamed it. His doing so suggested a violent failure of patience and some savage energy behind his dysfunctionally effete exterior. Larkin responded with the utmost élan. Turning slightly towards me, he asked _sotto voce _"What did he say?" I conveyed that Parbury had wanted to know what he thought of Ezra Pound. "Oh, much too difficult for me", he replied instantly. After transposing his words into the third person, I passed the reply onto Parbury, who must have heard it anyway, and said nothing more. We finished our tea and left.

Over the next year or so I saw something of Parbury as we came and went in the library. The authenticity of his literary proclivities was attested to by his occasional attendance at the readings by visiting poets that Andrew Motion organised while a junior lecturer at Hull. Larkin turned up at these sometimes, though not on the same nights as Parbury.

I had first met Philip Larkin in 1969, when I had represented the poetic tendency among undergraduates at an English Department reception for Richard Murphy as Hull's Compton Lecturer in Poetry. On that occasion as on every other on which I was in his company, he exhibited a wonderfully weightless combination of conservative formality and eccentrically scintillating wit. He would be accommodating for chats at the bar during the intervals of poetry readings. I especially enjoyed the event at which he fell asleep, or made a good show of pretending to, while Craig Raine read in paroxysms of delight at his own cleverness and continued in like vein at length between poems. I remember being surprised once when Larkin seemed almost physically stopped in his tracks by some flippant remark about mortality in poetry I made to him while he bought me a drink. As his verse indicated, he was acutely sensitive on the subject and had recently completed 'Aubade', the best of his late poems and perhaps his most brooding meditation on death.

Parbury disappeared from the English Department somewhere during his second postgraduate year. Well before then, he had become the subject of confidential exchanges that implied doubt regarding his general conditions of sanity. He had always seemed vaguely on the edge of breakdown. Unlike Parbury, Dr Larkin kept his hands from his lips when he spoke, was not interested in Ezra Pound, and filled more space than he took up in his dealings with other people. Larkin did not live for many more years, expiring in 1985 to make way for Motion's prurient biography of _il migglior fabbro_ whose society he had so assiduously sought out. But they were, after all, both Oxford boys.

7


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